Musical Evaluation in a Mexican University Music School: Student Reviews

Abstract

Evaluation is one of the components of the educational process that has begun to become increasingly relevant as a result of new educational approaches to learning opportunities. The field of arts education has its educational idiosyncrasies, most perilously “the subjectivity” involved in production and artistic creation attempting to achieve “beauty” or “musicality.” For this reason, the overall educational process, and evaluation of music in particular, should be studied in order to avoid procedural biases; the lack of information on assessment processes in the field of Mexican music, however, prompts us to realize this project. This paper provides an initial approach to this perspective based on the opinions of students in our country. We use a quantitative-descriptive methodology and the results indicate the dominance of traditional forms of assessment within the framework of the music studies; in short, the evaluations remain subjective as music is still considered a subjective discipline. Thus, we note that even though a large number of students learn the educational content of their subjects, the assessment methods they know remain traditional. Another element that supports our conclusion is that teachers generally administered only final evaluations. In addition, students expressed interest in the ratings they obtained, associating the achievement of good grades with getting a scholarship (43%) or some other benefit (20%). Finally, 60% of participants noted that the grades obtained were fair.